Sunday, August 07, 2011

Imagine if someone could dig up information only from a photograph posted on Facebook profiles. With the help of a special application, it could happen.

This was disclosed by Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of IT from Carnegie Mellon University, the Black Hat event in Las Vegas, United States.

In his presentation, Acquisti shows how easy it is someone important information based on the existing profile picture on Facebook and LinkedIn.

"The trend in the future is very easy to break into someone's privacy. I'm here just want to raise awareness about what will happen," Acquisti said, quoted by Computerworld, Saturday (06/08/2011).

Acquisti experiments conducted with his team's proven himself pulled in a number of data users only through photographs, the way it was not difficult.

First they use search engines, combined with the Application Programming Interface (API) that is able to extract about 275 thousand photos from Facebooker in several cities. Then the same is done on a dating site.

The result? With the help of facial recognition applications titled Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt), Acquisti managed to match users who have accounts at Facebook and dating sites.

Other experiments conducted by taking photographs of the 100 students in a variety of styles. Only took about 3 seconds, Acquisti managed to get 31% of the student profiles on Facebook.

Such technology is also claimed to be further developed, for example made for smartphones. Imagine just with a single snap, then all data in the victim's grasp.

The data was successfully arrested dikhwatirkan will be misused, eg for the purposes of the advertiser or the spread of spam. Moreover, nearly 90% Facebooker use real names and write sensitive data in the social networking site.

"Technology like this is almost a bridge between the digital life with real life," Acquisti said.